Excessive Author Notes:

The plot is…old. The show's done it. I've done it. Everyone and their dog has done it. This isn't self deprecation, just honesty. It's a little forced writing practice for me. I won't expound on the writing points I was working on (this message has been boring enough) and I only point this out to stave off the inevitable "this has been done before" pm's. :D

This concludes your public service announcement. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Excessive Story Notes:

This story assumes you are familiar with Supernatural, the universe, the characters, and the episodes. Spoilers abound, for anything and everything. And I do mean anything and everything. The story won't be nearly as intriguing or make nearly as much sense unless you've actually seen the show, particularly the first and second season, though there are allusions to the third.

Set Season Two. Sometime after WIAWSNB, but before AHBL. Which means the characterizations and emotional tones are set there, not season three.

Warnings:

Excessive use of run on sentences. Mild language.

Disclaimer:

Just playin'

Spiral

©2008sodakey

Dean woke with a burn in his lungs and the hot taste of ash tickling his mouth.

Fire! He thought, scrambling upright.

The knife under his pillow pulsed into his hand, and he was coughing and reaching for Sam before the cool-still darkness of the room seized him.

Hand hovering seconds from Sam's wrist, he straightened, carefully, turned his head right to left, pushing eyes into the shadows.

Nothing.

There was nothing.

He put his palm out, pressed it flat to the wall behind Sam's sleeping head. It came away cool.

Repeating the motion with the other walls brought nothing more than more cold and a pronounced shiver through his body.

When he opened the door to stare out at the parking lot, the wet rainy stretch of pavement was quiet.

"Dean?" Sam mumbled groggily.

Dean turned back into the room and shut the door with a cold click. The sensation of heat was gone, but the phantom taste of smoke sat acrid on his tongue. He coughed. "It's okay, go back to sleep."

"You alright?"

"Yeah."

Sam blinked. Slipping light and shadow crested the window, highlighting a rarely seen speck of gold in his right eye.

"Everything's fine."

"Fine?"

"Yeah."

"'kay." Sam rolled over, leg twitching and fidgeting before his breathing evened out.

Dean padded to the bathroom, unwrapping plastic from a tiny styrofoam cup to get water in his mouth. It was cold, tasted as keenly refreshing on his throat as glacier water, and he filled it again, twice, before making his way back to bed.

He lowered himself slowly, knees shaking, and rubbed a hand down his chest, testing the lingering soreness when he swallowed.

Maybe I'm coming down with something.

He sheathed his knife back beneath the pillow and stretched himself out.

Maybe it was just a nightmare.

There'd been some, since the djinn. Frequent enough for Sam to notice, for him to fret with silent stares and head shakes, asking only once if Dean had told him everything. Dean had tried to answer, once. He'd tried to tell Sam there wasn't anything in the dreams that hadn't been there before, but, he'd jumbled his words, couldn't explain that the djinn hadn't added or taken away, just made the gap between asleep and awake yawn wider.

It's no big deal, he monotoned to himself, repetitious fracture of a phrase that always stuck like glue somewhere behind his molars.

He was getting uncomfortably accustomed to new differentiations between myth and reality.

He didn't remember dreaming, this time, but that was okay. He didn't usually want to remember.

Restless, his eyes flashed to the ceiling, drab, plain, grey-white and empty.

He rolled over, closed his hand around the hilt of his knife and turned his head towards his brother, tracing his blurred outline through the dark.

Sam mumbled something in sleep, absently gripped his covers higher, settling deeper.

With a jerky motion, Dean used his left foot to scrape his own blankets away, bunching them at the end of the bed, burying just his toes under the weight, letting chilled dead air prickle over his leg hairs.

Cold was reality, more often than not.

Myth was warmth in opposing extremes and people telling him to get some rest.

Thunder grumbled, a deep growl overhead. Outside, the rain picked up. The steady wash of it against the window seeped over his senses and clashed against the rhythm of Sam's breathing.

Dean sucked in three shaky breaths of his own, forcing tension away.

Eventually, sleep returned. By the time morning appeared, Dean had shoved the incident into the box in the back of his brain stuffed with weird but unimportant things he never planned to talk about.

"IHOP?" Sam asked, zipping up his hoody.

Dean coughed lightly and reached for his own jacket. "Yeah."

"You getting sick?"

"Nah. Let's go."

Later that day, he noticed a nick in his finger he didn't remember getting, back of his third knuckle, the kind that usually came from working on the car but were never noticed until later. Dean would have passed it off as just that, except, he hadn't been working on the car. The Impala had been running smooth. Dean hadn't even cracked the hood to check the oil since their stop back in Dayton, two weeks ago.

He wound a band-aid around the cut with a frown.

By dinner it was scabbed over and forgotten.

It wasn't uncommon for Dean's joints to ache. The most consistent being his left shoulder. It stiffened up in cold weather, gave him fits after long runs, creaked and popped after sparring with Sam.

He was used to compensating.

But this ache was more, right and left, and all the nerves between.

It started small, then grew, spreading in a line from one shoulder to the other as he tried to get his shotgun up.

The poltergeist screeched, charging madly.

Dean fired.

The kickback walked the gun up on him, straining wrist and fingers, but he hit the target. The bright colors and angry mouth washed away on a wail.

He waited for the pain to follow suit.

It didn't.

Instead, the throbbing in his shoulders intensified, leaching down his wrists.

What the hell?

His fingers and hands were going numb and he was having trouble gripping.

Hurry, Sam.

Dean hunched his back against the attic wall, bent his right knee, planted his foot flat back to brace. His left hand swagged useless, pinched and prickling. He ignored it and used his other to balance the gun on his bent thigh, pumped the shotgun and winced-gasped for the effort.

A tiny breeze fluttered the stale air, coaxing minute specks of dust to lift and spin.

The fine hairs on Dean's neck corded upright, just as a new wail invaded, hissing high.

The double paned windows on either side of the room started to shake, slow cracks spreading from the corners.

Come on.

Both hands were purely pins and needles, his legs wobbled.

Show your face, you bastard.

A red flare abruptly colored his vision, coinciding with a jagged dig in his side. His braced foot slipped. He banged back to the wall with a groan and skidded down to his butt, clutching the gun clumsily, blinking away the bright haze just as the ghost flashed in front of him, mouth twisting.

He tried to negotiate the shotgun's trigger with bloodless hands but couldn't get it.

"Saaam!" he yelled. "Hurry!"

"Got it!"

Dean heard Sam's muffled shout, heard something crash and shatter a floor below.

With a howl the ghost flickered, screamed, and disappeared.

The windows stopped rattling and the attic became motionless.

Quiet.

Finally.

Dean let the shotgun clatter from his hands, slumping back.

Abruptly, he gasped, his shoulders jerked in protest and an unexpected new jab stabbed the side of his neck. Surprised, he lifted a numb hand to pat at it, frowning when it came down traced with blood. He swooned. Buzzing rose in his ears while flakes of grey shuttered his eyes, brain dancing light and then heavy.

"Dean?"

Sam's voice was a bright snap of reality. Dean sniffed, yanking himself back from the grey, walking his eyes towards the voice.

The attic door swung open and Sam filled the frame. "Dean?" He shot forward, kneeling down, tilting Dean's head to look at the blood. "Hey."

"It's nothing," Dean told him, mumbling, blinking wide, coughing to clear the croak from his throat.

Sam sat back on his haunches, scanning Dean head to toe with a blunt frown, circling his eyes around them, pointedly taking in the cracked but un-shattered windows and the dusty, graceful placing of unmoved, neatly cobwebbed furniture. His forehead crinkled as he reached back to Dean's neck.

Dean dropped his eyes, jerked his chin to the side, pulled his legs in and used the wall to make a play at standing.

Sam helped, gripping too tightly at his shoulders, frown deepening when Dean groaned.

"I'm good," Dean deflected.

The frown solidified, like one of those muppets whose mouths could open and close but never change shape.

Dean pulled free of his grip.

Sam gazed around the room once more, then bent to snag Dean's shotgun, checked the remaining bullet, jaw tilting down. "You weren't supposed to let it get that close to you. Did the gun jam? What happened?"

Dean shuffled to the door, feeling vaguely like he'd just been dragged through the woods and strung up by a wendigo. He flexed his hands, felt them sting from the idolum of ropes binding them high above his head.

"I don't know," he answered.

The ache was easing by the time they were back at the motel room, feeling returned to his fingers. Dean was convincing himself the whole thing wasn't really all that weird. For all their patterns and predictability, ghosts found new and exciting ways to kick their butts all the time, and this was just… that. Some weird, freak, poltergeist thing they hadn't counted on.

Sam caught him by the elbow as soon as they were through the door, gripped his jacket collar and peeled it down his back. He maneuvered Dean to sit on the end of the bed, tossed the med kit down by his hip, and reached to start on Dean's buttons, methodical and quick, like he thought Dean wouldn't give him trouble if he did it fast enough.

But Dean was fast enough. He caught one of Sam's wrists, gripped it harder than he thought he'd be able to. "Dude, I'm okay."

Sam had been dogging him since the djinn and hadn't yet let up, treating him carefully, touching his shoulder, patting his arm, a little too often, and a little too pointedly.

Sam kept his face neutral, his hands extended. "You're covered in scratches," he said, pressing a finger over something on Dean's forehead, worried eyes flicking down to the trace of blood at Dean's side. "Let me clean you up."

Dean lifted his free hand to touch where Sam's fingers had been, when he did, the muscles pulled across his back, spasming his shoulder. He winced, nostrils flaring as air zipped through his nose.

Sam settled his freehand at the base of Dean's neck, squeezing gently, eased his wrist from Dean's grip and kept going on the buttons.

"What exactly did the ghost do to you again?" he asked, after the cuts were dealt with and Dean was stretched out on the bed, holding a heat pack to one shoulder while Sam carefully rubbed down the other.

"I don't know," Dean said, once more, and tried to make it sound like it was no big deal.

tbc